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The Polar Street X is the most affordable GPS watch in the Polar line-up and the first watch from the brand that has a built-in flashlight. It also introduces a bold new look that’s designed to appeal to city athletes.
Aside from the new look and flashlight the Street X doesn’t bring anything new to the table, and the best running watches in its price bracket offer more features, better user interfaces, and also more accurate tracking, in our experience.
If you want an affordable running watch we’d look at the Coros Pace 4, Garmin Forerunner 165, or Suunto Run instead, and even if you’re all-in on the chunky, rugged look of the Street X, there are better options available like the Coros Nomad and Garmin Instinct 3.
Design & Key Stats
- Price: £219 / $249
- Size: 45 x 45 x 13.8mm
- Weight: 48g
- Display: 1.28in AMOLED
- Case material: Plastic
- Screen material: Gorilla Glass 3.0
- Water resistance: WR50
- Battery life (watch, raise to wake): 10 days
- Battery life (single-band GPS): 43 hours
- Storage: 32MB
Polar Street X review
What’s New?
The Polar Street X sticks to the same software and sports tracking features as other Polar watches, with its new features being design related. It has a chunky new look that’s reminiscent of Casio G-Shock and Garmin Instinct watches, and offers a built-in torch.
As a more affordable watch, the Street X is missing some features you do get on pricier Polar models. Most notably it doesn’t have dual-band GPS, only standard GPS, and it also doesn’t offer offline maps, though you can still navigate using breadcrumb trails with directions.
The Run Test: Likes
The price is our first like with the Polar Street X, because it’s the cheapest GPS watch in the Polar line-up and gives the brand a competitor to other entry-level running watches like the Coros Pace 4 and Garmin Forerunner 165, the latter of which is due a refresh itself sometime in 2026.
It’s also great to see Polar introduce a flashlight, joining Suunto in adding this feature in response to the popularity of built-in torches on Garmin watches, which have had flashlights since early 2022.
While it doesn’t have every Polar feature, the Street X does offer all the tracking and training analysis you really need at a fairly low price, including insights into your training load and suggested workouts not just for cardio sessions but also strength and stretching.
The design won’t be to everyone’s taste – we generally prefer lighter, slimmer running watches ourselves – but it’s a new look for Polar and having something different to the Vantage and Pacer lines could bring in new users.
Finally, the battery life did impress us during our testing of the watch, with the Street X lasting four to five days on a charge even with the screen set to always-on and running every day.
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The Run Test: Dislikes
While a design refresh is welcome, the Street X could have benefitted more from a focus on updating the software on the watch, because the user interface is dated and not as enjoyable as intuitive to use as those of other watches. Polar’s app is also hard to navigate and long overdue a major update.
We also found the Street X was laggy, especially when using the touchscreen to navigate the menus, and when starting a run the GPS takes a while to lock on and the signal often drifted in and out, prompting us to wait, then go, then wait again.
The accuracy of the Street X is also lacking compared with rivals in its price bracket. The lack of dual-band GPS meant that it was as reliable on this front as other watches, often cutting corners and producing shorter distances and slower paces as a result. The heart rate monitor was mostly OK, but we still had some runs where it produced an erroneous reading for the whole run, and it often read too high for the first few minutes of a run.
There’s a lack of smart features on the watch too, with no option to store music and no NFC payments, both of which are available on cheaper Garmins like the Forerunner 165.
Nick also found that the sleep tracking was inaccurate, often only logging half his night’s rest and so giving very negative feedback in the morning.
There are persistent annoyances in the user interface that haven’t been addressed for years with Polar watches, like only being able to show four data fields in your run and having to change the distance of an automatic lap in the app, rather than on the watch.
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Verdict And Alternatives
The Polar Street X brings something new to Polar’s range, but the dated user interface and app, lack of features, and unreliable accuracy means that it isn’t a watch we’d buy. The Coros Pace 4 and Garmin Forerunner 165 are better options if you’re looking for an affordable running watch, offering better accuracy and a more enjoyable user experience for runners.
If you want a chunky plastic watch to track your runs, it’s worth upgrading to the Coros Nomad or Garmin Instinct 3. The Nomad has a memory-in-pixel display rather than AMOLED, and doesn’t have a flashlight, but does have offline maps. The Instinct 3 is a better all-round tracker and does have a flashlight and AMOLED option.